Homeland Security wants to charge fee for crossing U.S.-Canada border

Randy Boswell, Postmedia News04.21.2013

The U.S. government is proposing to charge a new fee for every vehicle or pedestrian crossing the U.S.-Canada border — an idea that has prompted fierce objections from New York lawmakers who claim the levy would stifle transboundary commerce and undermine recent efforts to ease the flow of people and goods between the two countries.

The U.S. government is proposing to charge a new fee for every vehicle or pedestrian crossing the U.S.-Canada border — an idea that has prompted fierce objections from New York lawmakers who claim the levy would stifle transboundary commerce and undermine recent efforts to ease the flow of people and goods between the two countries.

The Canadian government, too, is raising alarms about the proposal, with an embassy spokesman in Washington telling the Buffalo News that “we’re confident that any study would conclude that the considerable economic damage any fee would do would greatly outweigh any revenue generated.”

The issue flared on Friday in the U.S. after Rep. Brian Higgins, a Democratic congressman from Buffalo, N.Y., drew attention to an item buried deeply in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s proposed 2014 budget, released last week by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Exactly how and where such a fee would be collected, whether it would focus on those entering or leaving the U.S. — or both — and how much each crossing might cost each traveller have not been determined.

But Higgins slammed the fee idea as “the absolute last thing we should be doing” at a time when both the U.S. and Canada are working to streamline cross-border movements, even as the countries’ respective border-security regimes aim to strengthen monitoring and enforcement along the 8,900-kilometre binational frontier.

Higgins has also suggested that a crossing fee at the Canada-U.S. border would be used to unfairly “subsidize” the more expensive and challenging security operations required along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security budget blueprint proposes to “conduct a study assessing the feasibility and cost relating to establishing and collecting a land border crossing fee for both land border pedestrians and passenger vehicles along the northern and southwest borders of the United States.”

The study, to be completed within nine months, would explore “the feasibility of collecting from existing operators on the land border such as bridge commissions, toll operators, commercial passenger bus, and commercial passenger rail.”

It would also identify the investments necessary to collect the fee “at land ports of entry where existing capability is not present,” and probe whether there are “any legal and regulatory impediments to establishing and collecting a land border crossing fee.”

In a written statement about the proposed budget, submitted by Napolitano ahead of her appearance last week at the House of Representatives homeland security committee, she said her department needed to find fresh revenue streams through fees to hire new border guards and to support increasingly expensive operations at international crossing points.

“Processing the more than 350 million travellers annually provides nearly $150 billion in economic stimulus, yet the fees that support these operations have not been adjusted in many cases for more than a decade,” Napolitano stated. “As the complexity of our operations continues to expand, the gap between fee collections and the operations they support is growing, and the number of workforce hours fees support decreases each year.”

Fees for various types of inspections, such as agricultural products and other commercial goods, are already charged at the U.S.-Canada border. Toll booths also generate significant revenues from regular travellers crossing the border, with the funds typically used to support the maintenance of roads, bridges, checkpoints and other infrastructure along the boundary.

Airline passengers in both countries also pay security levies on top of their ticket prices. In Canada, those charges amount to about $15 per round-trip domestic flight and can reach beyond $25 for international flights.

Previous U.S. government proposals to generate more income from transboundary travellers have been shouted down loudly by politicians in northern states. And the latest idea, though still only at the study stage, is also drawing fire.

“I was shocked to see a proposal for a new toll at the Northern Border and I will fight to put the brakes on this short-sighted fee,” Higgins said in a statement urging the federal agency to withdraw the proposal.

In a letter to Napolitano, Higgins further laid out the case against what he called “additional fees” that might be assessed on visitors “crossing into the United States,” which “would set a disturbing precedent on an already burdened public.”

He told Napolitano: “My district in Western New York is home to five international border crossings — three for automobiles and two for rail. Traffic crossing the border is an enormous component of our economy.”

Higgins said the “economic integration” of Western New York and southern Ontario “will define our region economically over the coming decades,” and even said the existence of the NFL football team Buffalo Bills and NHL hockey team Buffalo Sabres depends on “the growing ticket-buying base of Greater Toronto.”

Cross-border consumers from Canada are “also the reason why we have low-cost air carriers, thriving shopping malls and stable cultural institutions,” Higgins wrote to Napolitano. “I actively oppose this proposal to study any new fees and I urge you to do so as well. At a time when we are looking to increase economic activity at our Northern Border, we should not be authorizing proposals that would do the reverse.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, another Democrat from New York, told the Buffalo News that he would strongly oppose any new fees or fee hikes at border crossings.

“A secure and efficient border crossing is the lifeblood of the Western New York economy, and seeking to slap travellers here with onerous fees is a bad idea,” he said. “We don’t need a study to tell us that.”

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